Yelp announced last week that it would begin doubling down on its "Don’t Ask" policy, penalizing businesses that show signs of “organized review solicitation” by demoting their pages in the platform’s search results.

The company has repeatedly defended its policy (here, here, and here) by citing a 2016 research study from Northwestern University. The study states that “customers who are prompted (by an email) to write a review, submit, on average, up to 0.5 star higher ratings than self-motivated web reviewers.”

Yelp argues that its Don’t Ask policy is good for consumers because soliciting reviews leads to biased reviews that “artificially inflate...search rankings and online reputations.”

The only problem with that is that the exact opposite is true.

Anonymous platforms have a tendency to skew toward the negative. Take, for example, the anything-goes, troll-like behavior that’s become so popular on the forum 4chan. Business owners have long complained of a negative review bias on Yelp, where angry and disgruntled customers are more likely to organically volunteer their thoughts than their satisfied counterparts

Ironically, the study Yelp uses to defend its policy actually says the exact same thing. According to the study, “self-motivated reviewers are more likely to be dissatisfied” leaving many businesses’ Yelp pages with a misrepresentative collection of poor reviews.

How to solve the problem? According to the study’s authors, review solicitation.

“[S]ending email prompts taps into an entirely new segment of the purchasing population without disturbing the population that is already reviewing, making the new set of reviews more representative.”

In the end, the most insidious form of biased content on the site is not solicited reviews, and not even fake or manipulated reviews, but a self-selected group of dissatisfied customers who are more likely to write reviews than any other group of people. By asking customers for reviews, businesses correct for an inherently negative reviewer bias, a move that helps consumers make better-informed purchasing decisions.

To make money? Maybe. After all, Yelp does profit when negative reviews drive desperate business owners to buy from the review site.

“The perception that paying Yelp will get you some ‘in’ is out there,” explains Josh Rubin, Managing Partner of Post Modern Marketing. “And it's true to an extent. As a paid advertiser, you get an account rep who will help you with your page and give you tips on flagging false reviews.”

True as that may be, Yelp’s interference in review solicitation doesn’t make economic sense long-term. The company’s revenue model doesn’t benefit directly from bad reviews -- that is, its ads don’t help remove or improve negative reviews, they just drive more traffic to a business’ Yelp page. That traffic won’t do much good for a business who is already being punished by a misrepresentative bad score.

I would be remiss not to mention that Yelp has battled years of extortion claims from business owners who say the company uses high-pressure sales tactics, threatening to raise or drop ratings depending on whether they advertised with the review site. The allegations are so widespread and have endured for so long that the company even has a page on its website dedicated to answering the question "Does Yelp extort small businesses?" (The company says no.)

Call me naive, but I agree. I find it hard to believe that a publicly traded company that undergoes annual audits and regulatory scrutiny would be able to pull off a heist as elaborate as that without getting caught. It’s much more likely, I think, that these claims are due to a combination of business owners frustrated with Yelp’s review filter speaking to bad salespeople at Yelp who imply they can manipulate reviews in order to land a commission.

When asked to comment, a Yelp spokesperson explained the company’s reasoning for its Don’t Ask policy like this: “A business is more likely to ask their satisfied customers to write reviews, and when businesses heavily solicit or offer freebies or discounts in exchange for reviews, that puts other businesses who play by the rules at a disadvantage.”

The problem, then, appears to be about warding off manipulated and coerced reviews to keep consumer confidence in the review platform.

I completely understand Yelp’s intention here. There are certainly some bad apples in the online reputation management space encouraging fake reviews and incentivizing real ones. But by conflating solicited reviews in general with coerced and fake reviews in particular, the company is essentially throwing the baby out with the bathwater. A policy that should have taken a hard stance on spammy and fake reviews instead asks business owners to stop engaging in the one activity that balances out the platform’s inherently negative bias.

To make matters more confounding, it’s not clear how Yelp hopes to catch business owners who solicit reviews. If the main goal is to improve review credibility, then why not make it harder to leave an anonymous review by requiring some sort of verification?

Or why not follow in Google’s footsteps and fight spammers with a more sophisticated filter algorithm? Yelp’s algorithm already takes a hard stance on suspicious reviews, filtering out 25% of reviews (often including real ones) and preventing them from affecting businesses’ scores.

The very study Yelp routinely cites in defense of the policy actually proves that soliciting reviews improves credibility, and Yelp would benefit from more advertising revenue if business owners encouraged customers to use the site more often.

The Yelp Inc. logo is displayed in the window of a restaurant in New York, U.S. Photographer: Scott Eells/Bloomberg

How Should Businesses Respond?

Whether or not Yelp’s policy is a sound business decision is left to be seen. In the meantime, business owners need to figure out their next move.

With those kinds of numbers, it’s obvious how the Don’t Ask policy might put businesses in a precarious situation. Either follow the rule and risk losing business due to biased negative reviews, or ask for reviews and risk getting penalized.

So what’s a business owner to do?

It’s worth a risk/reward analysis, for sure. If you already have a great Yelp score, it may not be worth requesting reviews of your customers, even if you do it in a fair and balanced way. But if you don’t have great reviews to begin with, then the penalty of being demoted in Yelp’s search results probably won’t seem all that scary. A 1 or 2-star average on Yelp is already so damaging that you won’t be in worse shape by earning less Yelp traffic.

For those companies willing to take the risk, the way to drown out a small, unrepresentative group of biased negative reviews comes down to earning lots more reviews from a larger, more representative sample.

The key is to make reviewing incredibly easy for your customers. Despite Yelp’s extreme policy, the platform offers some guidelines to get ahead:

Include a “Find us on Yelp” sticker on your business’ storefront.

Embed Yelp’s review badges on your website.

Use Yelp imagery on your business cards, websites and in your email newsletters.

In fact, Yelp is also okay with business owners including language like “Check us out on Yelp!” in follow-up emails to customers. It’s a soft enough ask to earn Yelp’s approval, and most customers know exactly what you mean.

If you feel like Yelp is instructing business owners not to solicit reviews on the one hand, but encouraging soliciting techniques on the other, you’re not alone.

Perhaps the recent statement is just meant to deter the bad apples in the online reputation management industry. Or perhaps it’s a signal of more policy changes in the future.

Either way, the Don’t Ask policy misses the mark. Asking customers for reviews gives you the good, the bad and the ugly -- not just the ugly. It’s good for consumers, it’s good for businesses, and it’s good for Yelp, even if the review site doesn’t realize it yet.

Ryan Erskine is a Senior Brand Strategist atBrandYourself, where he helps people take control of their online presence. Visit hiswebsite, follow him onTwitter, and read hisbook here.

Ryan Erskine is Director of Client Services at BrandYourself.com, a leading online reputation management firm, and the first DIY platform that makes it simple for people to take control of their own search results. As a 24-year old copywriter writing marketing copy for star...